Stunned, Carver lifted the tip of his cane a few inches, then drove it back into the sand, as if trying to spear something elusive out of sight below the surface. “He knows who I am, and he expects me to help him?”
“He thinks you’re a better bet than the police to get at the truth.”
“He told you that?”
“Sure.”
“He’s even craftier than I thought.”
“Or else he’s innocent.”
Carver looked beyond Nadine at a figure descending the wooden steps by the boathouse. Joel Dewitt. Nadine noticed something had grabbed Carver’s attention and turned her head to look.
Dewitt was striding toward them along the beach now, five feet beyond where the surf was spreading like white lace and then reluctantly backwashing to the sea. He was walking heavily, heels kicking up the sand. His shallow footprints seemed insubstantial, at the mercy of the stiff breeze off the endless Atlantic.
“He’ll want to know what we’re talking about,” Carver said.
Nadine nodded. “I suppose he will. I’m planning on telling him. You object?”
“Would it make a difference?”
“Sure. It might make it more fun.”
Carver didn’t shoot back. He couldn’t blame her for not liking the man who was after her brother.
When Dewitt reached them, he tried a grin but it quickly rearranged itself into a grimace. His lower lip was swollen and split, and not for smiling. He touched a knuckle lightly to the lip, then drew it away and examined a speck of blood on it. He looked at Carver and wiped the blood from the knuckle with his other hand, rubbing his fist tightly, the way a pitcher rubs a baseball before launching it toward home plate. If he rubbed hard enough, it would be as if the blood had never been there and his lip was all right.
“Hope I didn’t hurt the idiot,” he said. “How’d he seem after I left?”
“You might have cracked some of his ribs,” Carver said. “Maybe he’s hurt worse than that.”
Dewitt looked miserable and shrugged. “Lost my temper. It doesn’t happen very often.”
“You looked in control to me,” Carver said.
“Yeah. That’s how it is when I really get mad. I get kinda calm at the same time.” The ocean breeze plastered his pale blue shirt to his body. The front of the shirt was bloodstained. Drips. Spatters. Unlikely bold patterns that reminded Carver of abstract art. Dewitt glanced at Nadine, back at Carver. “What’s going on here? More secrets?”
Nadine explained to him that she’d met Paul last night, and told him of Paul’s claim of innocence. She didn’t tell him that one of Paul’s victims was Carver’s son, and that Carver had conned the family into hiring him.
Dewitt dabbed at his split lip again with a knuckle. “Paul might be using you, Nadine, making you an accessory to murder. That’s major trouble, babe. Sorta thing can mess up your life. I think, for Paul’s sake as well as yours, you oughta tell Carver where he is.” The extended stretch of talking caused fresh blood to ooze from the lip.
“But I don’t know where Paul is. He was afraid I might be pressured into revealing his whereabouts, so he kept that a secret from me.”
Dewitt shuffled his pointy black loafers on the damp sand, staring down at the odd indentations the smooth leather soles were leaving on the beach. More surreal artwork, indecipherable and temporary. “Okay, don’t tell even if you know. You love the guy. He’s lucky.” He managed a painful smile. “Hell, I’m lucky, too. For the same reason, even if it’s a different kinda love.”
Nadine, the reason, lit up like neon and leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
“Would you know how to get in touch with Paul again?” Carver asked.
“No,” Nadine said. “He said he’d contact me if he wanted to talk again. He’s being careful; you can’t blame him for that.”
Carver felt like telling her that mass murderers usually were careful, until near the end when they killed more and more often, riding their relentless compulsion to oblivion. Which maybe was what they yearned for all along. He knew it would be useless to point this out to Nadine, to tell her about the woman in Orlando and what her death might signify. Paul, with or without his medication, was probably going to take more lives, with less time between murders. He was losing control.
“Think Paul would meet with me?” Carver asked Nadine.
“Maybe. Under certain, safe circumstances.”
“If he contacts you again, will you tell him I want a meeting? Only to talk, to get his side. He can arrange it so he’s safe.”
“Sure, I’ll tell him. If I talk to him again.”
The waves were building higher, curling in on themselves as they met the undertow from shore-“tubing,” as the surfers called it. Maybe it meant a storm was moving in, though the sky was blue except for a couple of broken white slashes very high. They might have been clinging vapor from a jet plane, marring the heavens like scrawls from a giant hand.
“Want to go back up to the house?” Nadine asked, staring at Dewitt intensely and deliberately excluding Carver.
“No,” Dewitt said. “Fanning’s up there with your father. Let’s walk the beach awhile and talk.”
Nick Fanning again. Carver wondered just how Fanning fit into the Kave family equation in matters other than business. How much did he know? How much did he pretend not to know?
Carver left Nadine and Joel Dewitt prowling the angry edge of the sea. Then he drove to a roadside phone and called Emmett Kave in Kissimmee.
He asked the same promise of Emmett: If Paul contacted him again, would he try to set up a meeting with Carver? In a safe place where they would talk and nothing more.
Emmett agreed, but he skeptically asked Carver why he wanted the meeting, if it was for a reason other than tricking Paul into getting caught. Wary Emmett; a survivor of the jungle.
Carver told him he was having doubts about Paul’s guilt. It would help if he could talk face-to-face with Paul, and straighten out some problems regarding the evidence. A plausible He.
When he hung up the phone and got back in the baking Olds, he sat for a while perspiring, staring without focus through the insect-dashed windshield and seeing nothing but opaque swimming patterns of heat.
Chapter 28
Carver met Edwina for lunch at The Happy Lobster on the coast highway. They sat at a table near the long curved window that looked out on the sea. Far offshore, half a dozen sailboats resembled brightly colored shark fins cutting the glittering surface in rough formation. They appeared to be racing, describing a circular course that would deliver them across an invisible finish line at the point where they’d started. How the world worked, perhaps.
Edwina had ordered the seafood salad, Carver the broiled shrimp. They were sipping drinks and munching fried zucchini appetizers dipped in horseradish sauce.
Carver had called Van Meter and had him pull everyone off surveillance except for a man to continue watching over Edwina. It was up to Paul Kave now to contact Nadine or Emmett. And up to Nadine or Emmett to arrange a meeting and call Carver. It all seemed so easy that it was bound to turn into trouble.
“So what did Laura say to you?” Carver asked. He dipped a zucchini slice and popped it into his mouth, chewed and washed it down with a sip of Budweiser. He hadn’t had much breakfast and it tasted terrific.
“Awkward small talk at first,” Edwina said, “then she got around to saying she didn’t understand how I could let you get caught up in a vendetta without trying to stop you.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Nothing. She’s right; she doesn’t understand. Pass the horseradish.”
Carver slid the small plate the necessary few inches across the white tablecloth. Edwina delicately dipped and ate two zucchini slices. She seemed absorbed in the task. The scent of the cheese sprinkled over the hot zucchini mingled with that of the tangy sauce. Watching her savor the stuff made Carver even hungrier. They were both starving and where was food they could really attack?